Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A memorandum

A lesson to all non-white, non-Europeans: get a pet. There is no guarantee it would help, but it might. They watched as Ukrainian pets crossed border to safety Related A long-lasting tradition: "There is a striking discrepancy between the lack of feeling aroused by the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings—in their majority anonymous, unrecorded by the authorities and denied the dignity of a proper burial—with that excited by, say, the 1,000 lives lost in the crossing from East to West Germany during the Cold War. There is one obvious explanation: an African, an Arab or an Afghani who drowns in the Mediterranean, in flight from war, oppression or extreme poverty, is not seen as a human being in the same way as the Germans who were trying to flee ‘communism’ and were hailed as martyrs for liberty." —Stathis Kouvelakis, New Left Review, March-April 2018

“These people are not people we are used to… these people are Europeans.”  – Kiril Petkov, Bulgarian Prime Minister,  Associated Press , March 1, 2022

Western support for Ukrainian armed resistance

The Russian regime refuses to call the invasion of Ukraine a war. It was not until 1999 that the French Assembly designated the Algerian War (1954-62) as a war . The American Congress never designated the war on Vietnam as a war . In October 2002 the American Congress adopted ‘Iraq Resolution’ that would be known as ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’, and was not designated as a war. ….. 

Imagine this for a second: You want to buy a cat. They tell you that the cat is Russian. What would you do? 1. Ask the cat to show an ID. 2. Ask the cat a question in Russian. 3. Ask the cat whether she is for or against the invasion of Ukraine. 4. Do not buy the Russian cat and ask for a Ukrainian one. 5. Buy the Russian cat and bring her up with “Western values”. 6. Do not buy a cat at all. “For some Westerners, anything could be weaponized, including cats. Yes, CATS.  Amid the spiraling crisis in Ukraine, a ludicrous news story hit the headlines: Russian cats are sanctioned.  “The Fédération Internationale Féline, an NGO of cat registries founded in Belgium [sic], announced on Tuesday a ban on Russian-bred cats from its shows, and cat owners who live in Russia are also banned from the organization. This is the tip of the iceberg among a growing number of drama queens in Western countries who have jumped into a so-called anti-war campaign, with their moves going far beyond ...

Manifesto of the Socialists Against the War Coalition

It seems not equally so

Russia’s callousness towards its own soldiers

What made Russia and ‘the West’ engage in an unrelenting match on the dge of the abyss?

A degree proves that you are educated, but it does not prove that you understand.

We attacked a foreign people and treated them like rebels. As you know, it's all right to treat barbarians barbarically. It's the desire to be barbaric that makes governments call their enemies barbarians. –Bertolt Brecht The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread.  When evil-doing comes like falling rain, nobody calls out "stop!” When crimes begin to pile up they become invisible. When sufferings become unendurable the cries are no longer heard. The cries, too, fall like rain in summer.   – Bertolt Brecht,  Selected Poems General, Your Tank is a Powerful Vehicle It smashes down forests and crushes a hundred men. But it has one defect: It needs a driver. General, your bomber is powerful. It flies faster than a storm and carries more than an elephant. But it has one defect: It needs a mechan...

Central Banks as weapons

To the Russian anti-war movement

A review of the definition of wealth in the 2021 World Bank report

Saudi’s war on Yemen and the ‘West’. Refugees. Sanctions. Myanmar. International oil companies and boycotts. Israel and the Palestinians. Blatant racism

The racist character of Fortress Europe on display

Students to pay off loans into their 60s

  Statements on the BBC and other media outlets

The reemergence of civilizational thinking in the last two decades of the twentieth century and at the heart of capitalist modernity is a defense mechanism, a futile attempt to salvage an outdated mutation of capital and culture at the commencement of the project early in the eighteenth century. At a time when the rapid globalization of capital has dismantled the very viability of national economies, at a time when postmodernism destroyed the cultural production of national cultures, and at a time when poststructuralism has deconstructed the very metaphysics of presence at the heart of the Enlightenment and all its categorical (e.g., civilizational) constructs, retrograde forces like Samuel Huntington, Allan Bloom, or Francis Fukuyama have put up feeble resistance to moral and material forces beyond their, or anybody else’s, control. More than anything else these feckless attempts make for rather pathetic scenes to observe, when outdated good and evil no longer recognize that the chang...

Another political science and journalistic approach that excludes the political economy of the world we live in.  Leaving the oil argument aside in relation to the invasion of Iraq, I agree that the ‘madman’ argument, racism, arrogance and hypocrisy are long standing characterises of the Western imperialist powers. The ‘madman script and media-propaganda

Washington must prepare for war with both Russia and China Related The same magazine published this a few years ago

Credit Suisse has asked hedge funds and other investors to destroy documents relating to its richest clients’ yachts and private jets, in an attempt to stop information leaking about a unit of the bank that has made loans to oligarchs who were later sanctioned.  Investors this week received letters from the Swiss bank requesting that they destroy the documents relating to a securitisation of loans backed by “jets, yachts, real estate and/or financial assets”, according to three people whose firm received the request. Financial Times Swiss banks are also infamous for protecting fat accounts of Tunisian and Egyptian family members of the former Ben Ali and Mubarak regimes, among others.

Some of the misleading videos and photos Related Further false images

Large masses of people, greater in number and hopes than ever before, want to eat better and more frequently; large numbers also want to move, talk, sing, dress. If the old system cannot respond to those demands, the gigantic media-hastened images that provoke administered violence and rapid xenophobia will not serve either. They can be counted on to work for a moment, but then they lose their power. There are too many contradictions between reductive schemes and overwhelming impulses and drives.  Edward Said,  Culture and imperialism , 1994 ed. p. 399)

Naji al-Ali

Photos of female soldiers

Rana May be right. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a key economic turning point that will have many lasting consequences. Among them will be a quickening of the shift to a bipolar global financial system — one based on the dollar, the other on the renminbi. “China is our strategic cushion,” Sergei Karaganov, a political scientist at the Moscow-based Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, told Nikkei Asia recently. “We know that in any difficult situation, we can lean on it for military, political and economic support.” That does not mean China would break US or European sanctions to support Russia, but it could certainly allow Russian banks and companies more access to its own financial markets and institutions. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, the two countries announced a “friendship without limits”, one that will certainly include closer financial ties as Russia is shut out of western markets. This follows a 2019 agreement between Russia and China to settle all trade in their respectiv...

A provisional statement Related

“ Shares of Germany’s listed defence contractors soared on Monday after Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared the country would pour more than €100bn into modernising its depleted armed forces.  Stock of Rheinmetall, which makes tanks and armoured vehicles for Nato countries, rose more than 30 per cent in early trading in Frankfurt, while shares in Munich-based Hensoldt, which makes electronic sensors and is part-owned by US private equity group KKR, leapt by 45 per cent.  BAE Systems shares also rose 14 per cent, hitting record highs. The British group has a joint venture with Rheinmetall.” Financial Times

and the far-right are on the march

“Drawing on newly published macroeconomic statistics, this paper estimates the amount of household wealth owned by each country in offshore tax havens. The equivalent of 10% of world GDP is held in tax havens globally, but this average masks a great deal of heterogeneity—from a few percent of GDP in Scandinavia, to about 15% in Continental Europe, and 60% in Gulf countries and some Latin American economies. We use these estimates to construct revised series of top wealth shares in ten countries, which account for close to half of world GDP. Because offshore wealth is very concentrated at the top, accounting for it increases the top 0.01% wealth share substantially in Europe, even in countries that do not use tax havens extensively. It has considerable effects in Russia, where the vast majority of wealth at the top is held offshore. These results highlight the importance of looking beyond tax and survey data to study wealth accumulation among the very rich in a globalized world.” Macro ...

The best a analysis I have read so far. Straining under its own contradictions

“Here’s an irony of history: at the 1945 Yalta Conference (in Crimea, of all places) Russia argued that Ukraine was an independent country and worthy of its own vote at the United Nations, while the United States and Britain argued that it was a region within Russia. I guess history isn’t what it used it be.” –Matthew Stevenson, Counterpunch.org, 23 February 2022 After 40 years of allowing Russian oligarchs to hide their money and and wealth in Western banks and assets, granting them citizenship status and letting them finance political parties in the West, the EU leader Von der Leyen announced after the beginning of the Russian invasion that “ we will work to prohibit Russian oligarchs from using their financial assets on our markets.”

“ We should stand in absolute opposition to Western and Russian imperialism , we should support Russian and Ukrainian workers against their own rotten ruling elites and, in the West, stand in complete opposition to our own warmongering governments that having left a trail of destruction in the Middle East, provoked a crisis in Europe that we, not they, will pay the price for.”